posted at 11:25 am on February 1, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

And that’s just the OMB estimate, which Hot Air readers will recall doesn’t exactly have a track record for accuracy. Just last week, Barack Obama declared that he needed to freeze spending to arrest the growth of gigantic federal deficits, which have exploded since Democrats took control of Congress, and announced a freeze on non-defense discretionary spending … sometime later. Today, after casting himself as a deficit hawk, Obama will roll out a budget with a $1.3 trillion deficit while admitting that this year’s gap will be $1,600,000,000,000:

The White House will predict a record budget deficit in the current fiscal year and more big shortfalls for the next decade in its upcoming budget proposal, a congressional source told Reuters on Sunday.

In its budget proposal to be released on Monday, the White House predicts a record $1.6 trillion budget deficit for the fiscal year that ends September 30, the Capitol Hill source said.

According to the estimate, deficits will narrow to $700 billion by fiscal 2013 before gradually rising back to $1.0 trillion by the end of the decade, the source said.

The estimate for the current fiscal year is significantly higher than the $1.35 trillion figure forecast by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last week.

Despite the difference, both estimates indicate that the deficit will continue to hover at a level not seen since World War Two, when measured as a percentage of the economy. Last year the government posted a $1.4 trillion deficit.

The $3.8 trillion budget blueprint President Obama plans to submit to Congress on Monday calls for billions of dollars in new spending to combat persistently high unemployment and bolster a battered middle class. But it also would slash funding for hundreds of programs and raise taxes on banks and the wealthy to help rein in soaring budget deficits.

To put people back to work, Obama proposes to spend about $100 billion immediately on a jobs bill that would include tax cuts for small businesses, social-safety-net programs, and aid to state and local governments. To reduce deficits, he would impose new fees on some of the nation’s largest banks and permit a range of tax cuts to expire for families earning more than $250,000 a year, in addition to freezing non-security spending for three years.

Despite those efforts, the White House expects the annual gap between spending and revenue to approach a record $1.6 trillion this year as the government continues to dig out from the worst recession in more than a generation, according to budget documents released Sunday by the White House. The red ink would recede to $1.3 trillion in 2011 but remain persistently high for years to come under Obama’s policies.

Obama is “slash[ing]” his way to a record level of spending. The estimate for FY2010 is just over $3.7 trillion dollars, but when it was submitted by Obama to Congress last year, it was $3.6 trillion. With Democrats in charge of Congress, that topline will almost certainly increase rather than decrease.

For a little historical context, let’s recall what those big-spending Republicans did while they had control of the budgeting process. The GOP controlled Congress and the White House from 2001 through 2006, which means they passed the budgets for FYs 2002-2007 (they also controlled Congress during Bill Clinton’s final year, but had to negotiate with him to get one passed.) Spending in FY2002 was $2.011 trillion, and by FY2007 it grew to $2.73 trillion. Democrats then took control of Congress and increased the budget to $2.9 trillion in FY 2008. They bypassed Bush for FY2009 by delaying passage of the budget until Obama took office and hiked spending to over $3.1 trillion. This year’s budget increased spending by $600 billion alone, in one year almost the same amount profligate Republicans inflated it in six years.

And now it will go up even farther. Does anyone recall this rosy set of predictions for budget deficits from the Obama administration?

Obama’s admission represents an increase of at least $300 billion in the FY2010 deficit. That makes it almost as bad as the FY2009 deficit. Furthermore, his FY2011 budget deficit will be $400 billion more than their projections last March. FY2012 will also have a trillion-dollar deficit, which means that this projection was off $500 billion for that year as well. For just those three years, the White House missed its marks by over $1.2 trillion dollars, and managed to add over a trillion dollars in annual spending since the last all-Republican budget. That represents an increase in spending of 43% in just four years.

And after that, Obama wants credit for freezing less than 13% of the budget. Riiiiiiiiiiiight.

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Comments

Painful Stool, whether you are posting here or over at ASHQ, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. You are simply delusional. It’s all of you non-contributing, non-tax paying leftists that caused this mess and are making it worse by spending us into oblivion. Who’s going to pay for your gubamint subsidized mac-n-cheese when all of us tax payers are either out of business or have gone Galt.

We are talking about the annual budget here and it is interesting not a single MSM organization reported what the last budget was President Bush signed and how much of an increase this is. Let me refresh some facts the media did not think was important to mention.

The last budget President Bush signed was for 2008 and was $2.9 trillion.

We actually went the whole year of 2009 without a budget (again the media didn’t think this fact was important to mention) so spending was locked in and it was set to be the same, but in Feb Queen Pelosi and President Obama signed a $400 billion spending bill to finish out the year which included a $200 billion increase.

This means that President Obama inherited a $2.9 trillion budget and anything over that is 100% his spending increase. What I have not heard the media report is where this $1 trillion increase is all going to yet.

Now I am hoping the GOP filibusters this out of control budget, but I am not going to hold my breath they do.

There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune.

He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural “cool” and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him.

During the first hour, Rush indicated that this budget includes ‘revenues’ from both Cap and Trade and Healthcare reform… which by guess-timate indicates the true deficit will be around $2.5 TRILLION (2.5 million, millions)

phreshone on February 1, 2010 at 12:47 PM

That’s correct. Remember, Obamacare would’ve slashed Medicare and raised taxes on everyone. All under the guise of “health care reform”. So unless that bill passes, the Dems will have to come up with that additional revenue to keep the deficit from being even higher.

So, fresh from an appearance before the House Republicans, the reviews of which cast Obama as a formidable debater with a keen analytical mind, O-Blah-ma comes out with this dreck. And what does this leave us to believe about him?

Well, apparently he’s not an idiot, despite all that we have seen in the last two years. And obviously he stills enjoys the support of massive Dem majorities in both house of congress.

So this suicidal spending orgy must be what the keen intellect of O’Baahma believes is best for America.

This B.S. on the “bipartisan” blue ribbon panel was discussed by Paul Ryan on Chris Wallace’s show on Sunday. It would have more Democrats that Republicans on it and Ryan said the result would be tilted to favor Obama. The GOP needs to get out there and expose this. Now just WHO is it that is playing fast and loose politics while Americans suffer?

Today, I heard a little bit of Obama running his mouth and he blamed all of this on Bush. He said that when he walked in the door, he was facing a deficit left by the previous administration and Congress..as if he himself were not part of that Congress at the time.